THE BIG HEAT by Tom LyfordStill at large… on the lamafter all these long years…the poet in me rats me out, offers me a plea bargain...places my hands on my headand escorts me at gunpoint out into the siren-searchlightswhere I… Freeze! Up againstthe wall! Assume the stance!

And in the hallowed halls of The Poetic Justice Department… beneath the bare lightbulb… strapped into the polygraph’s hot-seat and other hardware of your goodcop-badcop world…

I sing like a canary spill my guts name names

on thousands of blank pages… into hundreds of open mic’s…Look, I’m cooperatin’, see?